The Product Development Journey!

April 11, 2017

Recently, we hired Craig as a product manager. Craig is responsible for understanding and overseeing the development of UX (User Experience) and his job is critical. Why? Because the Pilot app is more complex than your average language translation tool. Pilot is dynamic (thanks to the conversational mode), and runs conjointly with a wearable device (the Pilot earpieces). So it is important for us to explore how our backers will engage with the app and the earpieces not only independently, but also together, as one product experience.

Before he could start prototyping ideas and concepts, Craig had to develop customer profiles and conduct user research to understand how users would engage with the product. For this, he needed our backers’ help so he sent out a survey to our most recent customers.

The survey was divided into multiple sections to help us understand the demographics of our users, the preferred use cases, as well as the intended user scenarios and potential features. From our survey’s results, we discovered many of you don’t actually use translation apps for conversations (maybe that’s because Pilot is not out yet!). We also found out that Pilot’s uses will be quite diverse. Some of you are excited to own your first pair of wireless earbuds to stream audio and some of you are eager to translate business and travels situations. Some of you indirectly are looking forward to improving your language skills using Pilot. In all instances, it seems as if the Pilot app and the earpieces will become an extension of your smartphone and follow you everywhere you go, and we’re beyond excited to make this happen very soon!

As a result of this survey, 11 interviews were conducted over 2 days where Craig spoke with participants via 30-min phone calls. The survey and the interviews helped Craig gain further insight on users’ expectations to develop a foundation for the extra features on the Pilot app.

“There's so much you can learn just from observing and asking the right questions. It's a critical part of our design process. We work in iterative cycles: developing, refining and validating ideas with users along the way.”

We wanted to thank all of our backers for their participation and insight. We might contact you again to give you the opportunity to become a part of our customer advisory group as we deploy feedback sessions, and potentially beta testing projects in a near future.